


Sufferance

by lonelywalker



Category: Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Genre: F/F, Pregnancy, Strap-On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:28:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Offred remembers a time when she and Moira were free, and slavery was just another fantasy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sufferance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thinofsubstance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinofsubstance/gifts).



> Thanks to my wonderful beta, lilacsigil.

I don't remember the books.

Tomes, spines split and bent, pages dog-eared and stamped, doodles and scribbles lining the more interesting pages... I can imagine what they must have been like, weaving themselves into unwieldy towers on the edge of my desk, spilling onto the floor to be used as doorstops, mini tables for coffee cups, a prop for yet another pile. I can imagine burning my eyes out by lamplight in the early hours when I was barely awake, can almost see Moira flipping through political theory, snapping gum in her mouth, and discarding John Stuart Mill with a resounding thud against a threadbare dormitory carpet.

But I don't remember.

I remember Moira lying back on my bed, fingers twitching for a cigarette (she'd spent her last cents on a crummy paperback that, even now, was gathering mold in her room). I remember looking at her, splayed out like some parody of a Michelangelo sculpture. Not even a corpse could seem so relaxed.

It would have been inevitable, once, I say in reply to a question I have forgotten. My guts clench, and something lower.

Moira breathes out. She reaches down, occupying her fingers with the flesh of her belly, breathing out and holding it.

Can you imagine, I say in some eerie combination of intellectual horror and erotic delight.

My fingers want to slip there, too, as Moira massages her stupidly fake belly, and finally gives it up, breathing in and coughing.

I can imagine. Wanted children, changing my body, filling me up: this is what I want, then. But I also imagine children without thought of want. I imagine a state of being that cannot separate womb from self. I imagine sex that, too, is inevitable once I start bleeding. I imagine being changed even as I am changing, breasts swelling with milk before I know what their adult shape would be, a smooth young body crippled with stretch marks and labor pains, and consumed with an undeniable, unquestionable sense of womanhood.

I breathe out.

Thank god, Moira is saying, as she often does. I don't have the time for it. Who does? And it's not the same for men, not even today. Nine months. I'd want to rip the thing out of me - all that crap, that pain no man would ever willingly go through, and then no time for yourself ever again. You'd be a martyr for kids who'd probably end up hating you.

It must have its good points, I say, thinking of Madonnas painted throughout history, adored as mothers rather than lovers. I think of my body, prepared for years now by puberty, protected from conception by plastic... How close had it been? How far gone would I be in another age?

My fingers brush my thigh, feeling the fat of it, and the usual thoughts of needing to go running more often are quickly dismissed by how sensuous it could be in the hands of a painter. My body: ungainly and lacking the petite breasts and narrow hips and boyish muscle of an athlete, but yet so perfectly designed to be taken advantage of as a woman.

I have not been listening.

Moira's thumb is running over the place where the clasp of my bra makes the barest bump in my shirt. I close my eyes, and think of her breasts, now, too firm to be maternal, her body too rigid to welcome a child.

She pings my bra with a snap that seems too loud in this tiny room, but on one side of us is a cool exterior wall, and on the other is her empty room, and my hand stays where it is as she laughs.

I remember the men more than the books, even clouded as they were with the usual smoky alcoholic haze of college bars. Mostly boys, with acne and facial fuzz, and inexperienced dicks. There was a professor, once, shy and silent, but I'd only imagined coming when I'd been with any of them, and even that hadn't always happened.

Moira makes me imagine lying naked in a painting, sheets feather-light in the sunshine, my belly rounded with second-trimester obviousness, my breasts tender to the touch.

She unbuttons my blouse from behind, her forearms brushing against my hair, and, as though I am receiving a haircut from razor wire, I stay fiercely still. My groin is intensely warm, wet such that I suspect I may be bleeding, but instead I imagine being soft and fertile, driven by instinct alone to pull a man's seed into me.

The air is cool on my shoulders as Moira cups my breasts, kisses my neck although there's too much hair between her skin and mine.

There's a suggestion of... something, but I know what it is without the words. I have accepted this long ago, and my body has never known what it is to accept or deny.

Even face to face, the kissing is not important between us. Her thumbs press my nipples into hardness, ready to be suckled by an eager infant, and my breasts, larger than hers, fall into her hands, glad to be relieved of their weight.

I have had her love me before, on nights when it seemed only friendship driven beyond friendship by alcohol and a shared despair. I have tasted lips that must have seemed stained with tobacco but for mine being the same. I have felt hands smooth out my breasts and hips as though I were a goddess built from clay. Her mouth, gloriously wet between my thighs, has been a kiss I cannot forget.

Moira has something I enjoy more, though: hard and veined in plastic, it chills even in a warm room, but when I am slick and welcoming, it is soon hard to tell truth from substitute, want from need. I hold her body and feel secure in feeling her breasts push against mine, in touching rough straps that pull tight over willing flesh. There is no danger of reality here, as we wind our way through the fantasy together.

Climaxing is not the aim, though. Climax. The peak. The close. The end, as music soars to a crescendo. No, the end is lying quiet and calm in a darkened room, feeling steady breath on my neck, an arm flung around me, and wetness on my thighs. The end is felt to be a beginning, my body finding its purpose, working and changing and growing and making me anew.

It would have been inevitable, once, but I made a decision twice: once for Luke and I, to be a mother, swollen and corrupted with the joy of youth; once for the sake of hope, lying between a barren woman's hips, fucked by a man who will never know my name.

I think of how Moira's fingers and tongue and need and all meant nothing. I think of how they meant everything.

In my mind, I turn the pages of forgotten books, and feel her inside me again.


End file.
